Friday, December 26, 2014

At the height of the civil rights movement,the journalist and historian Gary Wills coined the phrase "the Second Civil War" to describe the federal government's assault on segregation in the South. Fifty years ago, Washington and the civil rights movement won two huge victories, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but that was only the beginning of the new struggle between the South and the North. The white South immediately flexed its political muscle in 1968, giving all its electoral votes save those of Texas to Richard Nixon or George Wallace. After returning to the Democratic fold in 1976 to elect native son Jimmy Carter, it became pretty solidly Republican from then on. Virginia, North Carolina and Florida are now swing states, but the rest of the region is almost entirely Republican.

Virginia, North Carolina, Florida and Texas have also grown enormously in population relative to the rest of the country. In 1964 those states had 64 electoral votes among them. A belt of industrial states from New York through Pennsylvania and the states on the shores of the Great Lakes had 161. Now those four southern states have 95, while the northern belt has fallen to 134. The exception to teh nationwide pattern is California, which already had 40 electoral votes in 1964 and now has 55. Two days ago the New York Times ran a story about population movements to the South in recent decades, pointing out that many northerners and westerners have realized that housing and energy are much cheaper there, and now return north for the holidays. Today another story pointed out that when Congress convenes, six of the House's standing committees will be chaired by Texans.

The South has been more backward economically than the North for the whole of American history, and it is still much poorer in per capita income and much more subject to various social pathologies such as teen pregnancy, crime, and poverty. But in the late nineteenth century the South learned to turn this into an advantage by exploiting cheap labor. In subsequent decades it managed to move much of the textile industry out of the North. Those gains have not lasted--those jobs have now moved further south, to foreign countries--but the new service economy has proven even more suitable to this strategy, as I am reminded almost any time that I have to make a customer service call.

Whether you are calling your telephone company or your internet provider, the odds are that you will be connected to someone with a strong southern accent, no matter where you live yourself. Their competence varies widely, but they cost relatively little. Other kinds of calls--especially relating to computer hardware--take you much further, usually to somewhere in South Asia. In today's economy here in the US there must be millions of over-qualified people, including recent college graduates, who would be glad to do those jobs--but they would have to be paid much more. Since business schools have long since stamped out any feeling of national, much less regional,responsibility among corporate leaders, I doubt any of the leadership thinks to question any of this.

I have been most depressed over the years when I have to deal with customer service for the home delivery of my New York Times, or my subscription to The New York Review of Books. There are obviously two sacred publications of the northeastern liberal elite. The Times people are very frustrating to deal with, because they will not allow you to contact the local subcontractors who actually deliver your paper. (No one knows this, but in 2012-13, when I was a visitor at Williams College, I singlehandedly got the town's Times delivered on time, instead of after 9:00, by making about 30 calls to the 800 number and eventually finding the local subcontractor myself.) But what is really rather striking is that both the Times and the New York Review call centers are located in Mississippi. Their employees, particularly those of the New York Review, are intelligent and competent--but it has not occurred to the management of either of these publications, apparently,. that they are contributing to the relative decline of their own region and the culture and values it represents by sending their subscribers' money into the Deep South. Yes, both publications are surely running deficits, but wouldn't it be worth something to them to keep that money closer to home and help the educated but less-well-off members of their own community?

I had brief moment of hope some months ago when I had to call my financial services firm, one of the nation's largest. I was connected to a woman with a strong New York accent. When we had finished our conversation, I remarked that it was nice, for once, to be connected from some one from my own part of the country. But the joke was on me: she was now living in Arizona. The northeastern elite seems to have lost any feeling of responsibility towards its less well off neighbors, and they are paying a huge price for this in political influence.

Friday, December 19, 2014

My books (see the list at right) have always tackled big topics, but their conclusions almost always put the events they describe in an even broader perspective. I did this well before Strauss and Howe's books appeared in the 1990s, but they gave me a new framework. Some of these conclusions have included an element of prophecy, and this week, another one of those prophecies came true.

I will begin with American Tragedy: Kenndy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War, which appeared in 2000. The last five pages of that book were the most intense that I have ever written, and although no reviewer saw fit even to mention them, I have been very gratified by the reaction they got from many readers. They were written from the perspective of the top of Angels Landing in Zion Canyon, which I had climbed literally on the day in July 1965 that Lyndon Johnson effectively announced that we were going to war, and then again in 1998. The last sentences read as follows.

"The massive rock mountains that surrounded him now inspired
more humility than pride.Carved by the Virgin River over many millions of years, they had loomed
over the whole of human history, and would undoubtedly remain as they were for
thousands of generations to come.And
meanwhile, in just three decades, the Vietnam War, horrible and tragic though
it was, had definitely retreated into the background of American life. Having
brought one era of American history suddenly and dramatically to an end, it had
begun another that was probably less than halfway through even as the century
drew to a close. The disintegration of the civic order that the war had begun continued,
and seemed to be leading inexorably to some new and unforeseeable crisis.In that crisis his own questioning, idealistic
generation would finally discover its true destiny, while their children faced
it wherever the front lines turned out to be.The outcome of that crisis would probably create some new civic consensus,
a new set of certainties, and new social roles.And these new institutions and beliefs would prevail for perhaps two decades more, only to be rejected by still
younger Americans in a seasonal cycle destined to persist through the whole of
American and human history."

I did now know then, of course, that the crisis was less than two years away when the book appeared. The course of that crisis has been the main subject of these posts (which all told would fill two large books now, including the collection I self-published in 2009.) It has been, needless to say, a huge disappointment--but great historians do not argue with history.

American Tragedy showed that John Kennedy had single-handedly kept the nation out of war in Southeast Asia in 1961, and very strongly suggested that he would never have gone to war there had he lived. I did not realize it at the time, but it was therefore quite natural for me to spend the next six years investigating exactly why he had died. The result was The Road to Dallas, which appeared in 2007. Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, but Oswald acted as part of a conspiracy led by major organized crime figures. They were the same men who the CIA had enlisted in 1960 to assassinate Fidel Castro, and they acted to destroy the power of Robert Kennedy, who was in an all-out war to put them out of business. These men--particularly Santo Trafficante from Florida, and Carlos Marcello from New Orleans--were part of a huge network of mobsters, anti-Castro Cubans, right-wing Americans, and, at times, some CIA operatives. (Most of the network was not involved in the assassination, and I do not think anyone from the CIA was.) But the book drew me into the tragic story of the Cuban revolution and the United States' numerous attempts to overturn it, in which President Kennedy, I was sorry to discover, was deeply involved. I knew when I finished The Road to Dallas that any chance of legal action against the conspirators was long past, and I think it unlikely that anyone involved in the assassination is still alive. But I was haunted by the tragedy of Cuban-American relations, and they became the subject of the last two pages of that book, which I quote now.

"Fidel
Castro Ruz, whose revolution did so much to set in motion the events that have
been the subject of this book, has now held power for 49 years, longer than any
other political leader of the twentieth century.He has survived a 47-year American embargo,
numerous assassination attempts, nine American Presidents, the fall of his
Soviet Communist patrons, and, most recently, a serious intestinal ailment that
required surgery in the summer of 2006 and forced him into an at least
temporary retirement.Largely because of
American sanctions, Cuba
remains a poor country, although its health care and educational achievements
are much closer to first than to third world standards.The people enjoy relatively little freedom of
expression and the Communist party continues to rule, but Cuba’s
hemispheric isolation is easing. In recent years Latin American politics have
swung to the left, and Venezuela
has become a new and important Cuban ally..

"During
the twentieth century few countries had more closely intertwined destinies than
Cuba and the United States.In 1898 the United
States helped win Cuba’s
independence in a brief war with Spain, but promptly made that
independence conditional.For sixty
years no Cuban government was fully independent, and American business
interests controlled much of the island’s human and material resources.Castro’s revolution reclaimed those assets
and turned opposition to the influence of the United States into the organizing
principle of Cuban political life.It is
not only the fault of the United
States that relations have never been
re-established since 1960.On more than
one occasion, Castro himself has spoiled a chance for improvement with some new
initiative that was bound to anger his northern neighbor.

"Like
members of the same family, Cuba
and the United States
have left their imprint too deeply upon one another to ever live in complete
isolation.To Americans Cuba means not
only the war that made the United States a world power, but also Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, Guys and
Dolls and Desi Arnaz , Al Lopez, Camilo Pascual ,Tony Perez and Orlando
Hernandez, and an ethnic minority that changed the face of a the Southeast and
wields considerable political clout.For
Cubans the United States
means not only independence—first with North American help, and then in
opposition to the region’s strongest power—but also the source of Cuba’s
own national game, and a huge expatriate community. Yet the chasm that has cost
the two nations so dearly still divides them. The author looks forward to the day when
Cubans and Americans will vacation freely in each other’s lands, when Cuban
families shall be re-united, and when a major league baseball team shall make Havana its home.But all this still seems far off as 2007
draws to a close, and unlikely to come to pass at once, even after Fidel
Castro, too, has finally left the scene."

Regarding Cuba, as in so many other cases, Barack Obama has been maddeningly tentative until now, but I am delighted that I have now seen the day I wished for come to pass. I also believe, as I shall argue in a subsequent post, that the decision will turn out to be good policy (like FDR's recognition of the USSR in 1933) and good politics (like Nixon's visit to China in 1972.) Obama, fittingly, had not yet been born when Castro took power, or even at the time of the Bay of Pigs. He came into office determined to put the quarrels of recent decades behind us. Instead many of them have gotten worse, but in this case, I predict, he will succeed. And since Jeb Bush, who has suddenly become the most likely Republican candidate, has already attacked the decision, it may help the Democratic candidate hold Florida in 2016 with the help of voters much younger even than Obama, who have even less reason to cling to their parents' prejudices. More importantly, this is really the first step Obama has taken in seven years to vindicate his Nobel Prize. Our endless conflict with Cuba has done nothing but harm. In this case, to quote Clausewitz, he did not lose sight of "the ultimate objective, which is to bring about peace."

No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nation into War was written squarely within the framework of Strauss and Howe's analysis, which dominated both the opening and the closing of the book. Here is its last paragraph.

"Like the Transcendentals and the Missionaries
before them, the Boomers thanks to their immense self-confidence did much to
create a new crisis in American life, especially in the economic realm, but
neither they nor any other living generation has produced another Lincoln or
Franklin Roosevelt to lead the nation out of it. In our current political
climate, so reminiscent of the post-Civil War period, it is hard to see how
anyone could do so. The battle now being waged in Washington relates mainly to the provision
of income and health care for the elderly and the poor, while the broader
economic role of the government has essentially been given up. No reversal of
the trend toward economic inequality is on the horizon. Globalization has
effectively destroyed the idea of an economy combining private enterprise with
a measure of government planning. We have no new legions of social workers and macroeconomists
determined to spread the benefits of American life more broadly. Millions of
Americans are once again, as Roosevelt would
have said, forgotten men and women.

"The world scene today is certainly less
threatening than in the 1930s, but there, too, the Boom Generation has fall
short of its predecessors. In the wake of September 11, 2001, George W. Bush
quite obviously saw himself as a crisis President and dreamed of having an
impact on the world comparable to Franklin Roosevelt’s. He frequently spoke of
a great new struggle to define the coming century. Yet his administration lacked
the capacity for clear thinking, planning, standing up resources, and taking
advantage of the opportunities offered by the international situation that
Roosevelt and his colleagues showed again and again in 1940–1941. The outcome of Bush’s quest was
correspondingly disappointing: two wars, each of which has lasted much longer
than American participation in the Second World War, and both of which now seem
to have helped trigger the spread of anarchy throughout the Middle
East. Most frighteningly of all, the Bush administration abandoned
the earlier ideal of a world ruled by law. It went into Iraq in
defiance of the United Nations, refused to treat prisoners according to
long-established treaties, and flouted the opinion of the world. This was
hubris worthy of the Boomers’ GI parents in Vietnam, and it suffered a similar
fate. Boomers of both parties have defined the spread of democracy as the key
to world progress, but this is not likely to increase peace and justice in the
world if existing democracies, led by the United States, cannot provide a
better example.

"Authority has eroded over much of the world. The
most organized state of the twentieth century, the Soviet
Union, suffered the greatest collapse in 1990–1991. Conscription still exists in only a few
small states, and the size of militaries relative to population has fallen to
an all-time low. This is in many ways a blessing, and the world does not need
more conflicts comparable to the world wars of the twentieth century. Yet we may
find our capacity for clear thinking, genuine devotion to principle,
organization, integrity in action, and sacrifice for the common good has fallen
so far as to threaten the foundations of our civilization as we have known it. At
some future date, new generations may well face a crisis like those of 1933 or
1940–1941. If
they do, the achievements of Franklin Roosevelt and the rest of his generation will
provide a much needed inspiration."

Friday, December 12, 2014

War, wrote Clausewitz, is politics by other means. At certain times during peace, politics becomes war by other means, and subduing the enemy becomes the objective of one or more political contenders. So it has been here in the United States at least since the 1980s, when Newt Gingrich emerged as a leading figure in the House of Representatives, and so it is today. And to understand why the Republicans are winning--as they surely are--it is necessary to delve a little further into Clausewitz and look at a basic distinction he made between two kinds of war.

"War," he wrote in a preface written while he was
still working on the book, "can be of two kinds, in the sense
that either the objective is to overthrow
the enemy—to render him politically
helpless or militarily impotent, thus forcing him to sign whatever peace we
please; or merely to occupy some of his frontier-districts so that we
can annex them or use them for bargaining at the peace negotiations.” At the Naval War College, we named these two kinds unlimited and limited war, respectively. Those terms had nothing to do with the extent of the effort the two sides were making: they referred to the kind of victory they were seeking. In many wars, the two sides have had different kinds of objectives. The Union wanted to, and did, completely conquer the Confederacy and force it to submit; the Confederacy would have been content to force the Union to let it alone. Other subtleties often intrude. North Vietnam was fighting an unlimited war against the South Vietnamese government, but a limited one against the United States, since it only wanted us to withdraw from Vietnam. The US fought a successful limited war against Iraq in 1990-1 and a disastrous unlimited one in 2002.

Our political struggle is nearing its climax. Its essence is quite simple. The Republican Party has been fighting an unlimited war at least since the 2000 election. The Democratic Party has been fighting a very limited one: it wants to stay in power when possible, assure the rights of women and gays, and preserve social security, medicare, and the ACA. The Republican Party is fighting an unlimited war against the whole edifice of government and workers' rights that has been built up since the Progressive Era. Their propaganda argues that the Democrats are trying to replace the American system with dictatorship and socialism, but this is, frankly, ridiculous. Barack Obama essentially wants to keep the country where it is. In normal times that's a sound strategy, one followed in different ways by Ronald Reagan (who changed things more marginally than fundamentally) and Bill Clinton. But we are living in the crisis predicted by William Strauss and Neil Howe nearly twenty years ago. The old order which the Democrats claim to be defending is nearly dead, because the generation that were young adults when it was created are almost entirely dead, and thoroughly removed from power and influence. The Democrats have not put forward anything new to take its place. The Republicans have: a vision of almost complete economic liberty, in which the federal government no longer looks after the less well off, the United States economy is increasingly dominated by the financial sector and the production of fossil fuels, and both public and private employees lose the right to organize and bargain collectively. It will also be a world in which about 10 million non-citizens continue living in the United States, working as hard as any of us without basic rights. It will show no respect for civil liberties. Its attitude towards the rest of the world is much less clear, but I hardly expect to see the Republicans pull back from the Middle East.

During the last four years President Obama has consistently been at a disadvantage dealing with the Congress because he always wanted an agreement--a peace treaty in a limited war. They did not, and they threatened the destruction of the government to get more of what they wanted. Now that they control the whole Congress, their tactics will get much worse. Indeed, this is already happening: the Republicans have slipped a major amendment of the Dodd-Frank law into the continuing resolution they are about to pass, and the Senate and the White House are clearly not going to threaten to shut down the government to force them to undo it. This, mark my words, will be the pattern for the next two years. One Republican rider after another will be slipped into budget bills, and the President will sign them, I predict, unless they materially change Medicare or Social Security--and maybe even then. The Democratic illusion of limited war was evidently on display once again during Congressional negotiations last week, when Democratic leaders said a new, more generous provision on campaign donations by wealthy individuals was "a necessary compromise to forestall more aggressive efforts by Republicans next year to whittle away at other campaign funding restrictions." Nothing the Democrats do will forestall anything the Republicans want to do.

Centrist pundits still refuse to believe what is happening. They point to the renewed strength of more traditional Republicans vis-a-vis the Tea Party--a strength which is more apparent than real--and say that now that the Republicans control Congress, they will to to "show that they can govern." But this is a total misreading, because the Republicans do not want anyone to govern the United States, in fundamental ways. They want armed citizens to roam the streets of every city in the nation; they want freedom for Wall Street and employers; they want unregulated fracking. The reason the Tea Party is so influential is that more radical and militant factions always become stronger and more influential in the midst of an unlimited war. That was how the Jacobins took power in France in 1792 when European monarchs had invaded the nation, and how abolitionists won Lincoln over two years into the Civil War. Because the Democrats are so committed to the status quo, the strength of their radical wing in the Senate has now been reduced to two, Bernie Sanders (who doesn't even run as a Democrat) and Elizabeth Warren.

This is why, despite the electoral arithmetic to which Democrats cling, I am so nervous about the next election. Hillary Clinton, to begin with, is very much a centrist Democrat with close ties to Wall Street and AIPAC. She will not be running as a revolutionary New Dealer. She will depend on getting young people, women and minorities to the polls in sufficient numbers to elect her--but will this work? I see no reason to think that the youth or minorities will turn out for Hillary in the same numbers that they did for Obama. The Hispanic vote might if she takes a really strong stand on immigration, but everyone will know that it will be impossible to deliver on real reform with the Republicans in control of Congress. And meanwhile, the Republican dau tranh campaign (use the search function, above, if you want to understand that reference), will have reduced us to near-chaos for two years, and the country may want to vote Republican just to get that over with.

The Repubilcans have also been winning, I think, because their goals reflect the spirit of their age and of the Baby Boom generation. Individual freedom in every area of life has been our mantra for nearly half a century. Respect for leadership, sacrifice, and cooperation for the common good have gradually disappeared from our society. Democrats find it necessary to pretend that they haven't; Republicans are going with the flow. This has happened before, after the Civil War. It took another 40 years before the country even began to get back on track. That could be our destiny, too.

About Me

Since 1976 I have been a historian of international and domestic politics, as well as an authority on some of the more famous criminal cases in American history. For the past eight years I have been using this space to comment on current events. Links to my books, including, The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy (2008), appear above, at the top right corner of this page.. Simply click to learn more about them or to order them.
The email circulating widely attributed to me comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler is a forgery: see snopes.com/politics/soapbox/proportions.asp.
Comments are welcome, but comments that are both abusive and anonymous will be deleted.